The can of worms is spilling out.
Oklahoma lawmakers have introduced a bill that would allow students to request on religious grounds that their public schools provide a bathroom or other facility that bars transgender people.
The bill appears to be one of the first state-level legislative actions tochallenge the Obama administration’s directives, issued last week, that said students must be allowed to use the facilities that match the gender they identify as, even if that is different from their anatomical sex.
The Senate bill introduced on Thursday in Oklahoma defined “sex” as the “physical condition of being male or female, as identified at birth” by an individual’s anatomy.
It says any student can request a “religious accommodation” from a school for restrooms, athletic changing facilities or showers that are exclusively used by people with the anatomical sex at birth that is similar to their own. This means that a male student could request that the school provide facilities only for use by other students who were male when they were born.
It said a student can do so based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
The proposed legislation says single-occupancy facilities would not be considered an allowable accommodation.
This is the start of a good thing. One thing that seemed to get lost in this manufactured issue is that there are people besides the transgendered folks who have right too. But I disagree with the bill on the need for a religious exemption. If we have decided that transgendered folks can use whatever bathroom they please based on their feelings, then why can’t students insist on a monogender bathroom based on their feelings? Do they need a religious justification, or is the fact that they are uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with a transgendered person enough of a justification? Obama and the Left has told us that transgender people should be able to use the bathroom they are most comfortable in. Why isn’t that good enough for non-transgender folks?
See how complicated this gets when we abandon distinctions based on the scientific differences in sex and move to subjective classifications of gender?
Go for it, Owen. Who said the ambiguity was subjective, besides you? Examine the scientific literature regarding sex and gender. Heck, even just try plain ol’ literature – try the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides. Then get back to us.
The original B&S Cuck pipes up.